Britain’s NHS Is Dying — And It’s a Warning to the World
The Tragic and Shocking Collapse of One of the World’s Great Post-War Institutions
You don’t have to look very hard to see it. Britain’s NHS is collapsing. Now, oddly, the very first thing a certain kind of Brit will do is…get angry…at me…for pointing it out. But it’s hardly just me saying it: Germany’s Die Welt is just one of many publications to have articles with headlines like “Great Britain: a health system facing collapse.”
The death of the NHS is a turning point for Britain — and for the world. Because the NHS, while you might not often think of it that way, was one of the modern world’s great institutions, a model, a pillar, and a pioneer. Think of the world we once took for granted. In the ashes of the last World War, a new set of social contracts, offering expansive rights and systems that people had never enjoyed before, in all of human histry, were born. And foremost among those was the NHS — one of the world’s great post-war quantum leaps of civilization itself.
So to see it die? We should all shudder. But are we? I get the sense that even Brits don’t really fully grasp what they’re losing, don’t seem to care enough, are numb by now. I’ll come back to the Big Picture, though. For now? Some, let’s shade in the littler one.
